An affordable option for building a cheap home library, 20th-century hardcover publishers book series included reprints of classics and publisher’s back catalog titles as well as newly commissioned titles. A few series dominated, such as Everyman’s Library and the Modern Library, but there are many others. These pages document the diversity of 20th-century reprint book series. Click on a series below for more information about the series.

Cassell’s Shilling Novels

Cassell’s series of very cheap reprints under the Shilling Novel name can be found in advertisements back to at least 1885. The series consisted of romance, adventure, detective stories and light fiction in low-quality bindings printed on poor paper.

An advertisement for the series in The Teesdale Mercury, July 14, 1915, mentions the “three-colour pictorial paper jacket” as a selling point:

E. Temple Thurston’sThe City of Beautiful Nonsense is from late in the life of the series, in September 1931. It is a 2nd “cheap edition” printing, the first being in March of 1931. The novel was the basis of a silent movie (in 1919) and “talkie” in 1935.

Jackets are unique to each title in the series, consisting of a color illustration of the characters in the book. The very faded spine includes the (faded) series name at the top, the book author and title, and an indication that the book is “clothbound” for one shilling (the one shilling type is also faded). It’s not clear if there was a paper-bound version of the series, or if Cassell was advertising that a cloth bound book could be had for the price of some paperback books. The series name is on the front, bottom of the jacket front. The front jacket flap contains other titles in the series, including those by Sax Rohmer, Ethel M. Dell, Baroness Orczy, and Rider Haggard.